To W. from S.

Town has carried word to me about a woman and her child, a child with a father that is missing, fled, gone. I was standing amongst them, those who wish to banter and chatter and tell tales, when the news passed into my weak hand. And what was I supposed to do with it? I wanted to throw it far away from myself, remain ignorant, have it shatter and cease to exist.
I see colors around people, their character in a color, I never used to question myself at the goodness of people. What of that all now? You were yellow, there was a radiance about you. Perhaps war has shaded you red, the color of the dying man’s blood, of the devil, the color of the enemy seeping into you. Were you red before? Did I miss it?

I hurried away from the crowd, I dropped the information, I ran to the top of the hill, ran ran ran until my heart felt as if it would explode, I quivered, my pulse was banging inside of me, my heart beat in my ear drums and I laid down right there amongst the weeds and thistles. I prayed upward to die, I would let it all just pass over me, the ground would dig me a grave, because time does miraculous thing to nature. And at that moment, yes, dying made more sense than facing the truth of you, of who you have always been and whom I have not clearly seen. For you have been obscured, blurred around the edges.
Yet, people do not become monsters overnight; we only choose to paint them in a favorable light. For why pick out evilness in others when others could easily pick out the evilness in ourselves? Why play that game of innocent and guilty? But look at what you have done now, don’t you see? You wanted more than you could hold, now what are you doing to do with it all? Where are you going to lay it down? Why couldn’t you have loved what you had and not greedily asked for more?

I am not one to give up so easily, though. Here I am, standing with my arms stretched out open, forever repeating: I will hold on and keep holding on. Because love is the only thing I can do now.

i have been standing on the edge of this ship every hour on the hour. i have been praying for storm surge, for ocean arms, for tsunami lipstick to kiss me once more. you said you would have killed yourself if not for the children, i guess i understand it now.

i will not jump. but i might slip. have you not gotten my letters, felt my fingers? have you not missed my bearded cheeks on your shoulder, have you not written me at all?

this shipdeck is slick and it storms more now, in the heart of summer. sometimes i just hope to slip.

- w.

To W. from S. – May 11^th

I have the route to my childhood home absorbed into my mind, stitched into my skin. If I close my eyes, like the molded shutters to some abandoned house and remove myself from my own body, I can see the way as I did when I had bruised knees and a bottomless hunger. Recalling the street names is impossible now (yet, maybe the streets didn’t even have names to begin with) but I can still see the way the trees bend, as a guide, wooden compasses.

Sometimes, the children are standing in the kitchen watching me wash the three day old dirty dishes, my hands covered in a film of soapy water with pruned, wrinkled finger tips, and I will do it. I will imagine I am on a dirt covered road, thistles and branches and cornfields. Barefoot and sunburned in the summer, heading back to the front door of my home. (How it stood menacing on the top of a hill, how it was the color of damp wood!) The other night I dropped a plate and it smashed everywhere in the midst of this siphoned dream. Do you know what it reminded me of, that cracking, devastating noise? Bombs plummeting into the ocean, straight onto a ship, perhaps a ship that holds you- you’ll be rolling a cigarette and then you won’t, you’ll be gone, forever… like the man who fell into the ice. His black head was the last thing to go, like the edge of match being distinguished. Both of you will only remain as faces in photographs forever beautiful and untouchable, full of a young man’s sour tasting pride. 

My hands were shaking so horribly afterward, I could not clean the broken shards. I wander so far in my own mind, away from reality, that it frightens me. Pretending is my only sufficient way to deal with things, with life. If I pretend I am a child again, running home in the pounding summer rain, than I’m not thirty-three, my eyes aren’t red veined and swollen, I am not crying every night, I am not missing you. The other day, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, I remembered her funeral. My sister had ransacked the house and taken all the possessions I wanted, do you remember how livid I was with my fists clenched tight in the pockets of my coat? You were right beside me, though, you knew that without you there I was light like a feather, I might’ve floated away in the breeze, but with you, I was calm and complacent. You always had the ability or gift to set me at ease, calm the wild waters. Quietly, beneath your breath you whispered into my hair, “You prayed for her. You forgave her. You can forget her. Then you can learn not to miss her.”

Does this only apply to the dead? What about the living? What about you? Can I pray for you, forgive you, forget you, and never miss you again? Because this way of living is too painful to continue. 

To S. from R. – May 9^th

Day after day rolls over the hill in dense pregnant clouds and somehow, time doesn’t erase anything that has happened. I always feel this same protracted, weighted feeling in the sunken emptiness inside of my chest. This urge, this overwhelming electrical shock, like lightning pulsing through my veins. It drives me, it tethers me down. It brings the same dream inside of my brain that rewinds and fast-forwards. I can’t even drink it away anymore.

It begins and we are running, our lungs pushing in and out, yours falling into sync with mine. We’re this unstoppable machine and we can’t be brought down. Like when we were children with cardboard swords and shields in the forest behind our forlorn home. And then, with the snap of two invisible fingers, we’re somewhere far away- it is night, it is a desert place full of sand and recessed heat, it is deadly quiet. Through the blackness, I look at you and you appear like an x-ray on a light table, lacking all color but bright and glowing around the edges, this metallic, heavy being. Side by side, we stare at an outline in the distance. It is colored it, it if full of buzzing endless energy. It ends and we never make our way to the strange figure. 

When I awake, I realize, you probably saw the same thing in me. We’re both these colorless shells who wish to be anything but. One day, without our knowing, we slept for too long, for an unforgivably long time, and out of our mouths and fingertips, the colors dribbled away, leaving us silently, leaving us drained. We lost our magic. Our youth. No longer could we defy gravity or remain this impeccable, single machine. Like Siamese twins being cut apart, you discarded me like removing a coat. Don’t you understand how livid at you I am at times? I was left to deal with the burden of a dying mother. Of hearing all of her secrets on her deathbed. I am no preacher, I am no keeper. What am I supposed to do with the things that I know? The secrets that someone else held, do they know call me owner now?

I want to run to an ocean and walk as far out as I can, until the tide comes to my mouth and then I will swim as long as I can until I am exhausted. When my arms and legs fail me, I will allow myself to sink, just swallow water into my lungs and skin, like being born in reverse. Do you ever feel the same? (A part of me knows you do. Because, we’re much of the same, we came from the same womb, we share the same dirty blood. I know it and you do too.) 

may the third

my gentle rocking wave,

how can anyone measure longing? is there a tool that i have not found yet to determine the weight of this lump dredged deep in my throat that seems to awaken like the kraken whenever the sea mists paint your name across the deck of this god damn ship? is there any way i can put into words how this gunpowder stinks like death and how i only wish to bathe in the scent of your skin on mine once more? how can i begin to explain anything at all? i have seen hell alight these past few days, my sleeping is something to be wanted, i am growing older far faster than the lord has perhaps intended. and yet i stay clean shaven and stand up straight just in case the tides recede far enough to bring me back to you. i have written you every day and every word comes out wrong, so i throw my crumpled chunks of heartstrings into the sea, away to drift aimless like i aim to be. i am so scared in every way imaginable.
my father once told me that the only way to truly escape anything, whether it be war or the devil or the creeping blackness that hides within everyone, is to stay inside the sea and let it swallow your soul up. he said that if the ocean ever calls you home, then you can never truly be lost. there is holy water somewhere here and i will wash myself clean of everything that ever made you cry and everything that will ever break your heart. my absense is the last gift i can afford to give, please rebuild your walls higher so they can never be torn asunder again. pray for hails of gunfire to bring me to heaven. pray for sinking ships and whiskey whales to swallow me up, gobble down this tired body and leave me to wallow inside the hollows of the world. every night i bend over, creaking bones and all, and ask god only to take you deeper into his bosom and to hold you the way that i used to, only with a little more love.
i know that i am not brilliant, i know that your mother raised you well and taught you better than to get tangled up in spiderwebs like mine. love is a tricky scab that we cant help but pick and pick because we want proof that it is still there, still pulsing, still bleeding the same color as it did far too long ago. it seems that i have scratched myself to the bones searching for colors that were there all along. i know that i have failed you and i know that you have kept your quiet with the amity of statuesqe perfection, my cactus fingers cutting you open and you only loved me for it. i suppose that if you were in my shoes, dressed up in some naval outfit that fits too snug for my liking, then you would have already been awarded a medal for bravery in the face of absolute danger. they said, when we first set sail, that war is hell. i have since found that war is heaven and that love is hell, because war is an endless hallways of fire escapes and shoots and ladders, daggered across the pacific skyline blood red with loss and with the appeal of dignity still lingering just over the dying like of yesterday.
i love you the way i love the sea: i only wish to drown inside of you so that you could better see all of me. keep close to your brother and please reassure the children that i am fighting. between you and i, i dont know how long i can last at this, my scalp can only taste death once and i do not want to die nameless and broken. im so sorry that i left you in the dark so long, im so sorry that i do not have your affluence to tell you all the things you need to know. im so sorry that i ran away to fight demons that have been growing inside me like a child. i will return to you with halos hanging sturdy above my skull, demons excised, arms open to entangle you in all the love you are forever indebted to. please pray for me and i promise that i will unravel like a story soaked into the sea, finally broken apart, finally set free. there are doves somewhere nestled inside of this cracked ribcage and i will not return to you until they soar. you were always my favorite dream and i let you slip through my fingers, sands of time eroding all the towers i built barehanded and blind. i am a coward, this i know, leaving you to tend our young like a lonely shepard left to the wolves, but i have seen your swords shine and i have seen the way your eyes turn to coal when they need to smolder everlasting lessons into the tender skin of youth. you will make them better alone than i would have corrupted them with cowardice and fringed morality.
i love you, i love you, i love you, i never lied about that, i never blathered untrue, i never faltered with feeling. i only wanted to feel all there was to feel. send my spring angel and my summer son all the love you have to spare, tell them that i am being brave. i cannot bare to stand the thought of them looking at me through disappointed eyes. tell them i am fighting for them, tell them my guns blaze endlessly, saving the world, sailing the ocean, their floating father has yet to be harrowed in battle. yet i can feel the knuckles of death rapping on my locked cellar doors, waiting with patience for me to gather the strength to let him in. the sea will save me somehow. i will save you, i will save me, i will save sanctity or i will die trying.

i love you, to the edges of the world and back again, no matter what the black clouds may spell out.

-W.

Sometimes in the mornings I crack your door open and peer in on your sleeping frame, wishing I could whisper the secrets of the universe into the hollows of your ears and you would hold onto them and carry them with you. There are days when I feel as if I have failed you, but I have to remind myself that this is a lingering feeling that all mothers must hold and that you have grown up to be so much more than anything I could’ve shaped by my hands alone. You have bright baby worlds in your eyes and I am proud of the woman you are well on your way to becoming; I am proud to say that I had a hand in raising this creature, this beautiful girl. You are growing much faster than my heart can get a grasp on, and I still find myself wanting to pick you up and cradle you in my arms, but this, again, is a feeling I’m sure all mothers share. There are so many things I wish I could have instilled in you without you having to learn the hard way, but I know that I cannot just take those pains from you. I know that we all must bear some sorrows on our own in order to grow.

When I was a young girl my own mother, both soft and hard-edged, used to look me square in the eye whenever I was upset and tell me “Onward, Sophie. You must move onward.” And she never wavered, or cracked, or held me in her thin arms. She told me to pick up my sorrows and make something of them, not to become them. I used to fight those words with tight fists, and sob to her about how sometimes one cannot just simply move onward. Sometimes it’s hard to see which way is up, much less which path will lead us away from our sadnesses. I promised myself I would never take such a strong hand with you and that I would let you cry and shout if you needed. I promised myself, as I held your tiny pink body in my hands, that I would let you feel the world as you wished. And I know you do feel the world. I can see it in your eyes. I can see universes right on the brink of creation in the dusty pink on your cheeks and sometimes when you speak, the words that roll off of your lips strike me as more profound than I can even begin to tell you.

There are things I wish I could say to you, sit down and share with you, but my voice grows weary with the passing days and sometimes I cannot find the will to look you in the eye and tell you about my shortcomings or how to avoid the same ones. I suppose sometimes I feel the need to write things down on paper, to pass them to you silently—leave them for you secretly—so that one day when you are a woman you might have something of mine to hold onto.

I see your bright eyes take in everything and glisten with hope, and it gives me courage that I have been a part in making something that is bigger and more precious than anything I’ve got in my own heart. But I see the way that your shoulders droop these days, and the way the spring in your step has become more shallow. Please, do not let your losses become you. We are a family, we are love, and I will stand beside you and cradle you in my arms if that is what it takes to keep you from feeling the weight of all of life’s sorrows and letting them break you.

I love you, darling. 
You blossom and bloom much like the month we named you after.  

-mom.

P.S. I’m making pot roast for dinner.

To W. from J. - April 26^th

I used to measure the days in flowers, by their colors and speckled patterns, in an attempt to contort my thinking, to make myself believe that days stretched on into infinity, like a place where the sun never set. Or on some faraway planet that isn’t this one you and I are fixed upon. If the days became longer, than the fact that you had been gone for such an expanded period, wouldn’t sink into my longing, like falling into quicksand and slowly suffocating. My obsession grew; now, I have objects to assess my every fleeting feeling by. But, I wonder, what is there to measure loneliness? (Are there rulers or measuring tape that will stretch that far?) Or is it just that love is a way to calculate our loneliness by. An equation. You minuses me divided by time. Or simpler: without love we’re just forlorn, forever. 

In order to pass time, I go out into the winding streets of town and just amble, aimlessly. Walk on the sidewalks your feet once touched. Caress the door handles your fingers once grasped. Look into shop windows and see my reflection shining back at me, knowing that you once did the same, though, you didn’t see me, you saw yourself. Now, I wish more than anything in the world to see you instead. I am tired of looking at my own face. There is only so long that you can actually stare at yourself before you grow sick of every feature you have been given, features that have been passed down by parents like antique gold rings. I am not satisfied with any of it. I am not satisfied with who I have become. I am not satisfied unless you are here.

The other night, I saw your wife with the children, as I was meandering my way back home, consumed with the thought of your two hands grasping my shins, my body sprawled upon the earth, dirt collecting in the sweat that was forming on the small of my back. The youngest screamed out so shrilly that it broke my concentration. A dart of disturbance was hurled through my memory, the image of you and I crouching behind the barn, quiet as can be, fell away in an instant. To describe the look on her apricot colored face is something that is impossible, but it haunts me, it burned into my recollection. This look of overwhelming scorn, which she has always felt towards me. It burns like uncontrolled wild fire in dry grass. Flames stretch through the space separating our bodies, even when we’re out of each others sight- heating flesh, licking insides, boiling the guilt so that it bubbles inside of me, threatening to push out of my mouth in a foam, leaving me as a pile of flesh and blood and dissolved bone matter on the floor. She is a powerful woman. However, I am certain she cannot say why she feels this way when she sees me. I only know that it is a woman’s intuition that sometimes flares to the surface without invitation. Perhaps a naturalistic tendency that flows in our blood from prehistoric times, much like flight and response, she senses a threat, but doesn’t attack because her civilized bones tell her not to.

Still I wanted to rush to her, cross the street, and collapse at her two swollen feet, scream my sins upward to her, to the wide-open sky, to God, to everything holy. I was never good at telling the truth, though. My pride always gets the best of me. All I would do is weave my excuses around her like vines, shackling her to me forever. (“He influenced me, lured me, overpowered me. Ensnared me like a bear paw gets caught in a metal trap! I am just helpless and small, I didn’t ask for anything, I didn’t ask for him!”) Forgiveness would follow, she would love me, understand me. We would be together in our state of constantly playing the victim- knowing that it was man that has always tormented and destroyed woman. After all, it was Eve that betrayed God. Now it is man’s desire to punish all women. In return, my tears would be shed by her eyes and together we would raise the child you put inside of me… together.

And you. You would always be gone, cast aside. Realization would rise up in us. You had given what you always had to give, the only thing you had to give, and your job was done. But, I would never do this because I am not able; you know I’m not able. So, forever, my mouth will keep shut, while my stomach protrudes past my feet, until I give birth to a child that will never know a father, even if that father appeared in the doorway back from war one day, ready to start over.

Oh, that is just my delusional thinking, because you and I are much of the same – cowards. It isn’t much a matter of simple lying. Underneath it all, we’re just spineless. And that is worst of all, isn’t it - to go through life so feeble that even the slightest east wind could plow you over, leaving all your secrets in pools of spilled blood upon the ground for someone else to decipher?  

Father,

I sometimes find myself wondering where about in this big blue world they have settled you into. The nightmares about bullets finding their way into your heart have finally slowed, Mother tells me that I need maybe not stay out in the sun so long. She says it turns to poison if we let it sit long enough on our skin. Sometimes I fear that she will begin to miss you too much and go absolutely mad, tossing up her hands the way she does. Surely you know.
The days are quiet, now, without you. Although I expect that you know nothing of silence anymore, what with all the men and fighting and things that we hear on the radio after Mother goes to bed. Mr. Truman says that it will all be alright in due time, that nothing can stop us. I certainly hope that nothing can stop you. Rome has fallen once more, Father, and it is not necessarily up to you to try and repave the streets with gold. Should you try and carry the world, they will only become paved with blood. I miss you, everyone is gone sometimes, school is terribly dull. I find myself more concerning with caricatures of Mr. Dawson’s stoutness than trying to understand the importance of trigonometric sequences of gaudy numbers.
You will be missing my birthday. It is a travesty, a girl only turns sixteen once in her life and her father is supposed to welcome her to womanhood. At times I wonder if you will ever dance with me again, I have been working on my waltzes. That is what I will try to dream about instead of all the dark things. There ought to be sunshine in one’s mind. The devil can find himself inside the smallest cracks in one’s heart.
I wonder how long it will take for these letters we are writing to reach you. I wonder if you are writing back to us, we are waiting impatiently, anxiously, for word of your safety. You are in your children’s prayers nightly, I hear him talking to God through the walls. He is more scared than I am. The sea will try to take you, if you let it, do not let that ship become your home. We all bid you adieu and waved our white-flagged handkerchiefs across the Smithson dock when you sailed East, and we are all desperately waiting for the dock to bring you home. I hope you are sleeping again. I know that you weren’t for months before you left. I know that you want to be a hero and save someone’s life, but you should know that there are lives here that need your strong hands too.

”The sea was the house and the world was the nave
You were the sea and you were the nave

The nave was stormy, the sea was calm
While the house was waiting for the world

To come in by the navy of the sea
The sea was a nave, the world was a house”


Yours in love and prayers, rejoicing for your safety,

-A.

To W. from S. - April 20th

In my memory there is a man with slicked back black hair chain smoking on the park bench. He takes a pair of brand new ice skates from a leather bag next to his feet and puts them on. On the frozen over pond, he only moves in reverse, away from where I am standing in my sister’s passed down black coat, a size too large, so that it comes down past my knees, nothing more than a coat dress. I begin to wave to him, not a signal of hello or goodbye, but of reflex, of second nature. As he raises his hand in an attempt to wave back, a horrible cracking noise resonates outward from its source- sound before disaster.

One summer, my mother and I were hanging laundry on a line. Each piece of clothing resembled my weighted worries that clung to me like lint to the inside of a pocket. I would pin my mother’s beautiful pink silk slips up next to my own tattered, dingy and ripped school skirts. I still remember the frown on her face. All of my clothes had been taken out a few inches in the waist and the fact that I gained weight so easily disturbed my mother. I was nothing like her. All she wanted in the world was to have a daughter whose proportions made some sort of mathematical sense, bigger here, smaller there. In return, revenge, or as the form of intervention, she controlled the sizing of my portions at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and chained the cupboards up when I was home alone. She was warden of the kitchen, of her beautiful apple cheery blueberry pies; I was the inmate that knew no limit, who had no brain in their head or any sense in their spine.

That afternoon, I was pressing my thumb along the length of one of my mother’s lace sleeping gowns when everything fell silent, like pressing your ear up next to a dead mouth and not hearing a single rattled breath. Every blade of grass lay down in the yard and slept, the cat’s ears did the same as it ran into the house through the crack in the screen. The only thing I could hear was the beating of my heart, a slow pulse of sugary blood through my veins. My mother’s shrill voice cut through everything, though, like a knife through warm butter. She grabbed my left hand and yanked my body, like it was tethered to her own, into the house and down the basement stairs. Overhead horrible explosions of sound broke, like a Beethoven symphony, there was suddenly a great pounding and maximization of all noise. (Violins and then flutes, roaring all together now!) A train without a track was barreling down through the ground. I thought it would spiral straight to where we were hunching, right through the dirt and wood, sweeping my mother and I up into its great fury. All of my worries would be obliterated into a million, trillion, billion pieces, to be scattered over the world, for everyone else to carry. I would then be light, I would be capable of floating.

It didn’t, though; we escaped the storm that swallowed our whole town and even our house. For three hours my mother sat in the muddy dirt and cried for all her lost possessions- her chiffon dresses, the vintage dining room china that had red roses crawling all along the edges, the fresh babies breath in bunches that was still on the kitchen counter waiting to be places into arrangements. The possessions in the world that were perfect and unscratched, the things that were more beautiful and pure than I could ever be, were the things she cried for.

So, the day the ice broke I knew that everything would change, as well, because when something broke, everything managed to change. It was a law. There was a reciprocation involved in every movement of life- I knocked over a vase, my mother beat me with her father’s belt buckle (the same one he beat her with. More than anything it was a matter of tradition, of the morals she wished to brand into my pale, pasty skin with cold, hard metal.) I ate a slice of pink frosted cake at my grandmother’s house, I gained three pounds and in return my mother slapped that frown onto her face like it was a mask. The man with the slick backed black hair skated too closely to the thin ice, his weight gave out underneath him and he was swallowed whole- Pinocchio into the whales mouth, straight down into its belly.

That man wasn’t just a stranger skating on a pond in February while I walked my brother around the walking trail in a stroller. He meant something to me. His face matched a face I found in my mother’s wallet. In the torn black and white picture, the man is grabbing her around the waist, his large hands upon her slender little waist, and his eyes burning young and bright, like two distant suns to a planet I cannot even pronounce the name to. When I see him falling through the ice in my dreams, I only see two fire eyes collapsing into ice. It only seems fair and right that these two blistering balls be put to rest, extinguished forever.

And you, well, there was a consequence when you left for sea. Just like every occurrence in my small life, your disappearance into nothingness brought pangs of a feeling that had no name. Like being stabbed with pins in the most tender of skin or cutting open your body, removing all the organs, filling yourself with sand, stitching yourself back together, and then knowing that something isn’t right, though you can’t remember what it is, what harm you have done to yourself.

There was the smallest of sound, easily missed to those standing on the dock waving beside the children and me. But, I heard it. The sound of wood gliding over the mirror smooth surface of the Atlantic. And then, everything changed. Everyone thought the world changed when the war thundered over the banks of our town and boys went marching away, but the world really ended when you winked at me from the back of a ship heading off into the middle of a setting sun, into the eyes of the man without a name in a photograph I can’t forget. 

april 12th

to my soldier,

there are a lot of things that you need to hear and that you need to know, but they are also things that are only meant for ears older than yours. you will grow up quicker than your mother and i ever imagined and maybe then you won’t be so mad at me for leaving. i can still feel your little fists beating my thighs, as i hope you can still feel my arms around your neck, clinging tightly.
there is a war on, son, and i have been called away to try and make things right again. the world needs your papa, and i will fight tooth and nail to make sure nothing bad will ever happen to you. i do not know when i will be able to come back home, i do not know much these days; i only know that you are my beaming light and that i do not doubt for a moment that you will outglow the sun. you are now the man of the house, and you have duties, you have responsibilities. make me proud.
i am currently stationed somewhere out at sea, i think it is in the pacific because the wind blows west every morning and blows me down every night. the waves fight harder than the mortars do. water will always destroy more than fire, remember that.
and remember this: your mother is infinitely right in anything she tells you, and you ought to listen to every word she tells you. your sister is a dreamer and that means that she understands the world a lot better than i ever did. she sees things the way that they should be seen. keep close to her, do not let words or stones tear you two apart- your relationship is the only one in your whole, expanding life that will never fall beyond repair. love her intently and listen with unclasped ears, she is a dreamer after all.
i will write to you as often as i can, though sometimes the sea swallows these letters whole. she is a hungry beast untamed by the likes of me. i am alive as long as you believe me to be. you are nothing more than my pride and joy and one day you will understand the swells i am suffering to keep the storms from ever reaching you.

chin up, my soldier, your father will come as quickly as he can. mind your mother and offer to help with the yardwork, summer is coming and you know how quickly the jungle grows outside if we do not hammer it away.

you are my first thought always,

W.